Mugwump was written by Bob Albrecht of the People's Computer Company and inspired by a similar program called Hide and Seek developed for the PDP-10 by students of Bud Valenti from Project SOLO in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

A sample run first appeared in the People's Computer Company Journal Vol.

[2] The user enters a pair of single-digit co-ordinates in the range from 0 to 9 which are the x,y coordinates to scan.

Otherwise the user is told the distance from the scanned coordinates to the mugwump.

Frustration with grid based games like these led Gregory Yob to produce Hunt the Wumpus.